


Mariner

by oxfordlunch



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ableism, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Autistic Sherlock, Coming of Age, Dream Sequences, Eventual Romance, Friendship/Love, Heavy-handed use of nautical motif, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, John Had a Bad Childhood, M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 00:15:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5518328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxfordlunch/pseuds/oxfordlunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The boy in Sherlock's dreams has eyes like the ocean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mariner

**Author's Note:**

  * For [intensitycity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intensitycity/gifts).



> For my dear, if distant friend, intensitycity.
> 
> Part one of two. Wanted to get at least some of this posted for Christmas.

“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”

-Gustave Flaubert, _November_  


  
There’s a strange boy huddled like a damp seabird near the brim of the best rock pool. This is unprecedented, unacceptable. Sherlock’s outings to the shore are solitary endeavors. There are never strange boys here because nobody else knows where here is. This is Sherlock’s place.

He regards the boy at a distance. The stranger is bundled into a lumpy woolen jumper, his little fists jammed into the pockets of his denims. Sherlock is immediately suspicious of the denims. Mummy would never allow such things. This boy is already breaking rules and he hasn’t yet said a single word.

It’s a grey day, which is hardly surprising. It’s always grey here. That’s one of the most important rules. The wind kicks up spray from the ocean, kicks up short strands of the strange boy’s hair. Sherlock sees him scuff one of his trainers against the rocks and nudge at something on the ground near the pool with a ratty toe, knocking it into the water, and that is absolutely _it_. He classifies the boy a troublemaker and marches towards him, throwing up his arms to keep his balance as his oxfords slip-slide over stones slick with bladderwrack and seawater. His brain seems to effervesce.

Bladderwrack. _Fucus vesiculosus_. Most common algae in the Isles. First known source of iodine. I. 53. Necessary for synthesizing thyroid hormones in _Homo sapiens_. Necessary for life. Life begins in the rock pools. The sun warms the shallow water. _Fucus vesiculosus_ is born.

Sherlock grits his teeth and feels dizzy with thinking.

It’s supposed to be quiet here. The strange boy is breaking rules. He is ruining everything.

He slides to a halt a few feet from where the boy is standing staring at the ground and looks him up and down with frantic eyes. The boy stands like the others at the primary school, square-legged, ever ready to punt a football or piss on something. Dull boy, common boy. Sherlock fists his hands into the scratchy wool of his trousers, his body practically vibrating with upset.

“Leave!”

“Sorry?” The boy’s head remains bowed. Sherlock tracks his gaze down to the rocks and finds he’s watching a green shore crab scuttle by near their feet.

“ _Carcinus maenus_. Common. Boring. This is my place.” The crash of the wind and the waves washes out Sherlock’s voice. He finds himself nearly shouting to be heard.

The boy laughs. Sherlock finds he can hear him well despite the roaring ocean. He has a small voice, but it echoes into Sherlock’s head, amplified. His ears are often strange that way. At home, at school, his hearing plays tricks on him, the ticking of clocks like a train clattering by, the loudest voices distorted as if spoken through layers of glass, unintelligible.

It’s supposed to be quiet here.

“This is my place,” he insists again. “This is my dream. Get away from my rock pool.”

The boy tips his head up.

Sherlock starts at the sight of him.

The circle of the boy’s left eye is blackened, smudged a dark, purpling grey like the stratus clouds slung low over their heads. Sherlock feels an unsettling in his belly. He hadn’t guessed this, but he ought to have. There are rules. There are patterns. He can read them like he reads the heavy, yellowed texts he drags home from the library each week. Causations, correlations. Even here, by the rock pools, things have an order. There is logic for him to follow. He refits his deductions.

This boy is the bullied, not the bully, belying all evidence Sherlock has collected to the latter.

Sherlock stares at him.

The boy frees one of his hands from his pocket and offers it to him, steady even despite the wind and the chill spray clinging to the light, fuzzy hairs of his arm. “John.”

If Mummy were here, she’d nudge Sherlock forward, prompt him with a whisper at his ear ‘Hello, John. My name is Sherlock. It’s nice to meet you.’ But Mummy isn’t here, and nor is Daddy or Mycroft or Sherrinford. That’s the beauty of here. This is Sherlock’s place. He tears up the script and scatters it to the winds.

“Sherlock,” he says. He meets John in the middle, offers him exactly what he offered Sherlock, nothing more. Equal footing. His eye is blackened, after all. They aren’t so different. They shake hands, and Sherlock’s brain quiets at the firm, warm grip of John’s fingers against his palm. “You’ve a common name.”

John has a serious countenance, a crease to his forehead like Sherlock has never seen on a boy his age. His face lightens at Sherlock’s words, though, a smile playing about his chapped lips. “I’m the third John in my year.”

Sherlock narrows his eyes at him. “You’re not common though.”

John lifts the hand that had shaken Sherlock’s and touches his index finger to his lips, a real smile drawn across his face now. “Shh. It’s a secret.”

His face glows. He radiates imperceptibly, the way radios and television sets do, the way Sherlock can see and feel and hear that nobody else does. A faint humming under the skin. A shiver where his neck becomes his spine.

John has blue eyes, dark like the oily break of the sea.

Sherlock drowns in them, stands unmoving as he stares into them, fixated. 

“This is my dream, too,” John says. His hand moves slowly into Sherlock’s frame of vision, reaches out and presses at the skin around Sherlock’s own left eye. 

The bruise there throbs so forcefully that he wakes.

\--

  
He stops to stare at the dress in the storefront. There’s no awning over the window, and the drizzling rain that has gone on and on all morning patters steadily into his hair, slides chill down the sides of his nose. He fists his hand around the row of buttons on the front of his coat, a familiar, comforting habit. His brain works itself up like a watch being wound.

Blue dress.

Blue. Blue. Blue.

His world has become the blue dress in the window, but he doesn’t understand the why of it.

It’s a pleasing object, certainly. Sherlock is a great cataloguer of things. Everything, absolutely everything, can be ranked, filed, placed into perfect order. Six is a far nicer number than seven, for instance. Hot drinks are infinitely preferable to cold ones. ‘R’ is a lovely letter, while ‘V’ is uncomfortable and sparse. ‘Atlantic,’ never ‘Pacific.’ The cello is soothing, but the flute makes him want to plug up his ears and scream.

Mycroft tells him his ordering of things is illogical. Mummy finds it endlessly frustrating, often reaches wit’s end and tells Sherlock just what a picky nuisance he is, and why can’t he just eat what’s put in front of him?

Sherrinford, half-brother though he is, finds it quaint, and indulges him at every opportunity.

Sherlock continues ignoring the rain running down his collar and stares through the window at the perfect blue dress.

Short-sleeved. Button-front. Size 10. Laura Ashley. Lace sailor collar. Navy blue. Perfect.

But why is it perfect?

“Sherlock, for God’s sake.”

A rough tug at his collar, a ponderous, put-upon presence at his shoulder. Mycroft. Sherlock ignores him, tries to analyze the why of the perfect dress.

“Sherlock!” Another tug. A pause. Sherlock can all but feel Mycroft’s gaze following his own to the perfect blue dress in the window. “Ah. Dresses are your latest little intrigue, then?”

This particular dress, yes. But Mycroft can’t be expected to understand that. Sherlock’s brand of logic eludes him.

“We’re going. You’re half-drowned. Mummy’s going to be very cross, and you’ll have gotten me into trouble as well, I expect. I’m sure we’ve an abundance of ugly old dresses you can fixate on at home.”

There’s another pull on his coat collar and Sherlock throws out his arm and shoves at his brother reflexively. He hums in a monotone and twists his other hand around the sodden wool of his coat. He’s busy, he’s _thinking_. He needs to know why.

Mycroft is big, though, and heavy. He’s got seven years on Sherlock. Seven is a hateful number. Sherlock is six. He isn’t able to put up much fight once Mycroft grabs his arm and drags him away from the window. He plants his feet, he jerks his arm to try and free it.

“Quiet!”

Sherlock freezes and stares at Mycroft’s reddened face. He huffs in breaths. He hadn’t realized he’d been making any noise at all. The dress is gone, and he feels all wrong inside.

“Learn to control yourself, Sherlock. You must.” Mycroft’s eyes are red and wet, at the corners, past where rainwater might have settled. “You must.”

They go home.

That night at the dinner table, Sherlock sits and ignores his roast chicken. Dry, soggy skin, no salt or lemon to speak of. Unbalanced. Inedible. He stares around the dining room, listening absently to the drone of his parents and Mycroft and Sherrinford discussing the current elections.

His gaze falls on the familiar Courbet print that hangs framed on the wall. _La Vague_. 1869. Oil on canvas. Blue. Perfect. _Oh_.

He grins, kicks his feet under the table in joy. A pattern found, a connection made. Blue. Brilliant. “May I please be excused?” That phrase usually grants him immediate leave of the table.

Mummy frowns. “Apologize, Sherlock. Ford was just talking, and you’ve interrupted him.”

“Oh, lighten up, Mummy.” Sherrinford smiles at Sherlock, kind eyes, crew cut, neat auburn beard. “I’m sure he’s just had enough of our dull talk for one evening. Dismissed, Private!” He gives an exaggerated salute in Sherlock’s direction, then turns back to his dinner.

Sherlock bolts from the table.

He sits on the floor in the corner of his bedroom with his knees drawn up to his chest and thinks very hard about blue and why it matters.

Sometime later in the evening, there’s a quiet knock at his bedroom door. Sherlock’s gaze flicks up and around the room. It has fallen dark without his noticing. The door inches open. A dish is set down on the edge of his desk.

He hears Sherrinford’s voice whisper into the quiet. “Goodnight, lad.”

The door closes again.

Sherlock unfolds himself from the floor and gathers up the dish from the desk, settles back into the corner with it. He spoons down his serving of pudding from supper and feels warm inside.

He thinks about perfect shades of blue.

\--

  
He crests a grassy hill and sees John at the shoreline, skipping flat, smooth stones out over the breakers.

Troublemaker. He’ll stir up all the fish. Sherlock races down the beach to him, stopping a few feet away and frowning at John’s back, slight under a damp striped t-shirt.

“You’re in my dream again.”

John glances over his shoulder at him, smiles half a smile, and turns back to the ocean. “You’re in _my_ dream again.” He punctuates his words with a grunt as he hurls another stone. He doesn’t spin it properly. It smacks into a wave and disappears with a distant plunk.

“You’ll disturb the marine life.”

A bark of laughter. John drops the rock he has just picked up and straightens, squinting one eye at Sherlock, really smiling now. “You sound like on the BBC. The marine life live in waves, anyhow. Aren’t they used to being tossed about?”

Sherlock rolls his eyes and does his best to mimic the exasperated tone Mycroft often takes with him. “Don’t be dense, John. They’re used to being disturbed by waves. Waves are a known entity. Being struck with rocks is another disruption entirely.”

John blinks at him. “You read the dictionary for fun, I’ll bet.”

Sherlock crouches to examine a shard of bottle-green sea glass nestled into the stones. “You’re right, throwing rocks at innocent fish would be a far more worthwhile pastime.” He pockets the glass after a moment and looks up at the other boy, observing the sandy mud smeared over his hands and forearms, the gooseflesh raised on his bare skin. “Why aren’t you wearing your jumper?”

John shrugs. “Mucked it up playing football yesterday, I think.”

“You haven’t got another jumper?”

“I guess I haven’t.”

Sherlock stands and looks him up and down. He just practiced deductions with Mycroft two days ago. “Your right eye is bruised. It was your left last time.”

John shrugs again and stuffs his hands in his pockets, smudging mud all over the denim. “Football.”

Sherlock cocks his head at him. “Is football a violent game?” He honestly doesn’t know; he doesn’t know a single thing about football beyond that you can’t use your hands, unless you’re the boy who stands in the goal. He’s far too busy with his reading and his sketches and his violin to bother with sport.

That, and he’s never been invited to join in.

“Can be,” John says. He looks away from Sherlock and stares out over the sea.

Sherlock has never been invited to join in.

This sets him thinking. Mycroft would nudge his shoulder, would tell him to use his brain, would tell him to stop looking and start observing. 

Sherlock has never been invited to join in. Why? Because he is different. He is odd. He says wrong things and stumbles over his letters and looks into people’s eyes too fiercely or doesn’t look into them at all. He ferried the bleached skeleton of a _Salmo trutta_ morpha _trutta_ wrapped up in a spare uniform shirt to school one day and elephantine Nathan Thatcher crunched it up under his untied oxfords and called him a freak, shoved him hard until he overbalanced and fell with a whump into the schoolyard dirt.

But John plays football with the other boys.

“You get on with the other children at school.”

John snorts. “I hate the other children at school.”

“But they don’t bully you.”

“I hit back too hard.” John starts picking his way down the pebbled beach away from Sherlock, towards the rock pools. “Come on. Someone’s made a lunch for us.”

Sherlock scowls and tears after him, catching him up. “I am not dreaming about eating. I don’t eat here. It’s a waste of time. Go and have lunch in your own subconscious!”

“It’s my dream, too.”

“It is not!” Sherlock’s hands shake as he grabs at the hem of John’s t-shirt to stop him walking. “I’m supposed to be happy here. It’s supposed to be quiet. I’m supposed to be in control.” He stares at the sea over John’s shoulder, avoiding his eyes. “You’re a figment of my imagination. This isn’t fair!”

John closes his muddy fingers around Sherlock’s hand and gently tugs it away, turning to face him. His skin is impossibly warm when it should feel frozen. He doesn’t let go. The pressure of it is grounding. In his peripheral vision, Sherlock can see John’s gaze falling on his face. Blossoming bruise. Blue eyes.

“I hate the other children at school.” John has repeated himself.

Blue eyes. Izu-Ogasawara Trench. Marianas Trench.

Too much. 

Sherlock smashes his eyes shut. Too much.

The ocean sound cracks and splinters.

He hears John’s voice filter into the cacophony of wind and waves, a murmur.

“We’ll eat next time, then.”

He wakes with damp eyes, one hand clutching the duvet.

\--

  
He daubs the cobalt blue onto the white sheet in a wet, glossy circle. The oil paint is toxic, must be careful. He spent days trying to get his hands on the little tin tube. It won’t do to have it taken away.

The paint looks fractionally drier almost instantly. He sits back on his knees and examines the effect of the new shade where it sits an inch away on either side from a scribble of cerulean blue crayon and a hardened lump of turquoise candle wax. The cobalt sings to him, makes his spine buzz.

Closer. The cobalt is closer.

He stares around at the various bottles and boxes strewn about his bedroom floor. His watercolors. His wax crayons. His colored pencils. Pastels and acrylic paints lifted from Mummy’s art supplies. Food dye from the kitchen. The turquoise candle. Toothpaste. A spray bottle of ammonia-based window cleaner.

He’s tested all of them, and none of them are right. Shuffling his hands through his hair, he racks his brain for any further blues that may be found in the house. The cobalt is closer. He needs more like the cobalt.

A knock on his bedroom door.

“Sherlock?”

Is there anything left in the house? Or will he need to start asking Dad to pick things up from the shops?

“Sherlock.”

If only he could have the dress. The dress had been right. Maybe if he is very clever and very careful he can get another look at it somehow.

He starts at the sound of his bedroom door opening.

“Sherlo-- Is that your bedsheet? Have you completely lost your mind?”

Mycroft. Sherlock looks at him, stout in the doorway, jacket and tie and trousers even though it’s the summer holiday. He turns back to his sheet and tugs at his hair.

“Go back to school, Mycroft.”

He hears his brother stand breathing heavily in the doorway for a few moments. Then there’s a rush of movement and a thump of shoes on his bedroom carpet and his sheet is swept away from him, balled up in Mycroft’s arms, heedless of the not-yet-dry paint.

Sherlock blinks, speechless. A thousand, million words thunder around in his head but he can’t find a single one that expresses his upset. He curls on the carpet and clutches his fingers into the fibers of it and shakes.

He can hear his brother downstairs now, through the floor, through the open doorway.

“Mummy, _look_.”

“Oh, he’s still on about blue, is he?” From the echo of their voices, they are in the kitchen. He hears a spoon scrape the inside of a pot. “It’s pirates all over again.”

“People are going to think he’s mad!”

“Mikey! Lower your voice.”

“He’ll be put in the special class at school! He’ll have to live in a home when he’s older. He sat in a cold bath for an _hour_ last week and didn’t even notice!”

“Mycroft Holmes, you sit down this instant and you lower your voice.”

“The other children are cruel to him and you and Father don’t do a thing about it!”

“Mycroft!”

A door slams downstairs. The voices muffle.

Sherlock lies numbly on the rug and wishes he could have his sheet back.

\--

  
The blanket is navy, soft like Mummy’s cashmere scarf. Sherlock can feel the knobbles and divots of the grass beneath it pressing into his side. He snugs his face into the fabric, breathes in the ocean smell, the wool smell, the botanical smell of leaf aldehyde from the crushed blades of grass filtering through the blanket fibres.

Breathes in the quiet sound of John’s voice.

“Cold ham, cold chicken… oh, ginger beer!”

There’s a clinking of bottles and a shuffling of what sounds like brown butcher’s paper. Sherlock smiles into the blanket at the delight in his friend’s voice. Friend. Dream friend, imaginary friend. Friend, all the same. John hasn’t gone away, and so Sherlock has had to make his peace with his intrusion here. “I don’t like ginger beer. It hurts my mouth.” His breath turns the blanket humid under his chin as he speaks.

“Buttered rolls… gherkins…”

“No, and no.”

“...Egg mayonnaise…”

Sherlock groans.

The contents of the lunch basket rustle once more and the tension on the blanket shifts with the weight of several objects being placed next to his head. Sherlock blinks his eyes open and finds his field of vision crowded by a sleeve of store-bought digestives and a jar of strawberry jam.

John chuckles. “They must know you.”

Sherlock sits up and lets his eyes adjust to the cloudy daylight. He watches John extract a small piece of cardstock from the bottom of the basket and squint at it. “ _For my boys, -Love Martha_ ,” he reads. He pronounces it “Marth-er,” and Sherlock wonders idly why it is that the whole of England is allowed to talk as though they have rocks in their mouths, while he has to suffer through lessons with a special tutor because he speaks with a vague lisp. He reaches for the jar of jam and twists at the lid, finds he isn’t quite strong enough to work it open, holds it out to John with a scowl.

John takes it from him and cracks the lid easily, handing it back to him without comment. He tears open one of the packets of butcher’s paper and crams a thick slice of ham into the split of a roll. When he speaks again, it’s through a full mouth. “Wonder who Martha is.”

Sherlock watches John swallow down the rest of his sandwich and start fixing himself another one, popping the cap off of a little jar of mustard and dunking his roll in it. “Don’t they feed you?”

John shrugs and speaks around his food again. “She does her best.”

“She, who?”

“Mum.”

Sherlock stares at him, thinking hard, piecing together a puzzle made from tatty jumpers and black eyes and loneliness. 

Mycroft brings him to cafés sometimes, purchases a coffee for himself and a hot chocolate for Sherlock out of his own pocket money. They sit and Mycroft shows him how to observe the other patrons without staring at them. He teaches him what lipstick on a collar means, how to gauge someone’s mood by the drink they order, and how to comprehend the foreign language that is facial expression. New words are jotted into his vocabulary. Adulterer. Addict. Alcoholic.

He remembers a professor friend of Mummy’s who drank quite a lot of gin at their Christmas party last year. He had ended the evening by throwing a glass at a wall and being wrestled out of the house and into a cab by Daddy. The next morning, Sherlock had crept downstairs early and dipped a finger into each bottle in the liquor cabinet, tasting, cataloging. His mouth had burned afterward. It had made him dizzy, but not angry. He wonders if perhaps it is different if one is a grown man. Perhaps it sets fire to anger that already exists the same way it set fire to his tongue.

Perhaps John’s father drinks quite a lot of gin.

There’s a nudge against his shoulder and he blinks at John, who is looking at him with a raised eyebrow and a close-mouthed smile. “There you are.” He shoves a pair of biscuits sandwiched around jam into Sherlock’s fingers. “Go on and eat, genius.”

He takes a bite. The taste is familiar, the texture balanced and predictable.

John wrenches the cork out of a bottle of ginger beer and takes a swallow from it. “What should we do after lunch, then?”

Sherlock thinks on it for a moment.

“I should like to go see the puffins.”

“Where are the puffins?”

“North.”

“How do we know which way north is?”

Sherlock stands up and bounces on the balls of his feet and smiles, ducks down and snatches John’s sleeve and tugs at him until he stands up. “Simple, John. Come along!” He lets go of the sleeve and dashes off down to the shoreline, stopping amongst the pebbles on the beach and crouching down, searching.

What he needs is rare, but he knows somehow that he will find it here.

He hears John’s trainers crunch over the pebbles behind him. “What are you looking for?”

Sherlock doesn’t quite hear his question. He scans over the rocks. No, no… There. A shining grey chunk of rock, with lines as though it’s been sliced by a kitchen knife. He closes his fingers around it and springs to his feet.

“Neodymium, John. 60. Pass me the cork.”

“What cork?”

“The cork from the ginger beer! Don’t be dense.”

“You didn’t ask for the cork!”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Fine. Come on, we’ll fetch it.” He tugs at John’s sleeve again and clambers up the ridge they came from. They both drop to their knees on the blanket, and Sherlock takes up the cork and wrests it free from its wire trappings, entranced by his own work, quivering where he kneels.

He glances up at John, is caught up in his eyes for a moment. Blue eyes. They are sparkling. John is watching with his mouth split in a grin. He looks as enthralled as Sherlock feels.

Without breaking eye contact, Sherlock reaches for his own coat collar and prods his fingers around in the fabric until he catches his skin on something sharp and draws a tiny needle out from the wool. “John, do you have a pocket knife?”

“What? Oh, yeah.”

“Slice off a thin piece of the cork. The round way.”

John breaks his gaze away and does as he’s asked, handing the tiny circle to Sherlock.

He rubs the chunk of neodymium along the needle, one direction only, carefully counting out ten times, and pins it through small edge of the cork. “Go fill one of the jar lids with seawater,” he murmurs as he works, not looking up.

When John returns, Sherlock takes the lid from him and sets it on the closed lunch basket. “Watch.” He slips the needle and cork carefully onto the water. It spins gently. It stops north.

He hears John exhale.

“That is _brilliant_.”

“It is?” Sherlock has never been brilliant before. Mycroft is brilliant. Sherrinford is brilliant. Sherlock is strange.

“Of course it’s brilliant. You just made a compass!”

“It’s just basic scientific principles. It’s only because it’s a dream that I could find the neodymium in the first place…”

“It’s still brilliant.”

Sherlock ducks his head and doesn’t know what to say.

John flops down on the blanket with an arm behind his head. “I read in a book once how to use the North Star to navigate.”

Sherlock tips his head back to examine the sky and the world pitches forward, the clouds dematerialize, velvety darkness falls over everything like tired eyelids slipping closed.

The stars bob into sight in great shoals.

“Which is the North Star?” Sherlock whispers.

John lays his free hand on Sherlock’s shoulder pulls him back until his head is pillowed on John’s stomach. “So your neck doesn’t hurt,” he whispers back. He lifts his arm and gestures at a point in the sky.

At first, it doesn’t seem brighter than the others.

After a moment, it’s all he can see.

**Author's Note:**

> For any further comments, questions, or just to chat, you can find me on tumblr under the URL oxfordlunch.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover Art for Mariner by oxfordlunch](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5773690) by [intensitycity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intensitycity/pseuds/intensitycity)




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